The Politics of Form: Three Twentieth- Century Spanish American Poets and the Sonnet

The Politics of Form: Three Twentieth- Century Spanish American Poets and the Sonnet Jill S. Kuhnheim University of Kansas ABSTRACT This article engages the idea of poetic form to create a dialogue among three very different twentieth-century Spanish American poets: Argentine Alfonsina Storni, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Cuban Rei- naldo Arenas. Each of them uses the sonnet’s privileged position in Western aesthetic tradition to manifest shifting relations to this tradition and to modernity. In this, they open a dialogue with the lettered elite and use part of their cultural inheritance as letrados to confront the old order through an established aesthetic form, to reconfigure or question the opposition between high and low cultural forms to varying degrees and to different ends. These poets resignify their cultural legacy and in the process demonstrate its malleability—the sonnet is not monolithic, but mutable. An invita- tion to reinvent, the sonnet as employed by these poets embodies a range of intercultural experiences of both continuity and transformation. These readings, which engage with a range of poetic traditions (such as North American New Formalism), reveal how the choice of poetic form both shapes and depends upon the author’s and his or her readers’ experience and how a particular aesthetic form is both charged and changed by circum- stance. In these days, when prose and visual images are the dominant forms of communication, thinking about the sonnet reminds us of how poetry works differently, of just what this particular genre can do. Poets who return to this deep-rooted literary form open a dialogue with tradition; they enter a conversation with other poets and readers through form. The fourteen lines Hispanic Review (autumn 2008) j 387 Copyright ᭧ 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. 388 i hispanic review : autumn 2008 with varied meter and rhyme schemes of the classical Petrarchan model offer them a challenge, a possible map or blueprint that can function in different ways. The form presents a set of possibilities that controls what might hap- pen in the poem, an opportunity for renovation or experimentation within boundaries with which a poet might demonstrate his or her skill and high- light both tradition and innovation. A sonnet can also work as a kind of straitjacket, an emblem of authority or rigidity that may constrict both per- sonal and political struggles. Working within convention can have a conser- vative connotation, for formal poetry can be seen as sustaining normative cultural values. Yet aesthetic formalism can also serve as a ‘‘talisman against disintegration,’’ as poet Rita Dove has observed, or as a beautiful structure for unsettling our assumptions (qtd. in Gwynn 174).1 It is this aspect of the sonnet that interests me here, for the strength of its structure demonstrates how resistance to myriad social restraints can be manifested through form. The following examples from three distinct poets who use the sonnet in different contexts in twentieth-century Latin America will stimulate dialogue about how to connect literary and intellectual histories to social and political issues through a particular poetic structure. This attention to form gives us another angle on the dialogue between Latin American writers and aesthetic and cultural tradition (European and transcultural), which is, after all, one of the ways individual voices enter into collective conversations. Allowing the poet to innovate within tradition was one aspect that made the sonnet central to Spanish American modernism.2 Rubeń Darıó notably expanded the form, changing the versification from the traditional Spanish hendecasyllable to French-influenced alexandrines, using line endings with assonant as well as consonant rhyme (Bernardo Gicovate calls this one of Darıós’s ‘‘audaces invenciones’’ [265]). Gicovate also notes how modernism shifted emphasis in the sonnet from a spatial or architectural form to an aural or musical one (185). These changes do not seem radical today because they have become part of literary tradition; it is difficult, for example, to convince a group of students who are not familiar with poetic convention 1. This idea is inspired by Mary Jo Salter’s words about North American New Formalism: ‘‘Noth- ing unsettles us so much—in poetry or people—as a beautiful surface’’ (qtd. in Gywnn 187). 2. Modernism in Spanish American cultural contexts extends from roughly 1888 to 1910, and precedes the avant-garde. Aesthetic preoccupations are central to this movement, inspired by French parnasianism and symbolism, which revamped classical forms to innovate and recreate literary tradition, especially poetry. Kuhnheim : the politics of form j 389 that Darıó is really doing something new in his sonnets. The modernists’ sonnets now form the conventions within or against which we read later Spanish American poets.3 Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, poets with increasing distance from the modernist tradition, such as Argentine Alfonsina Storni, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Cuban Reinaldo Arenas, return to the sonnet’s confined space to express their own struggles to break out of a range of social limitations. Theirs is a kind of formal politics that plays on our preconceived ideas of what sonnets can do. Each of them uses the sonnet’s privileged position in Western aesthetic tradition to manifest shifting relations to this tradition and to modernity. In this, they open a dialogue with the lettered elite, Angel Rama’s term for the creole intellectuals who have held power and controlled who had the ability to signify in Latin America since colonial times. In The Lettered City, Rama chronicles the con- trol of the lettered elite from colonial times to the early twentieth century, noting few openings that might represent liberating transgressions; the oral circulation of poetry may be one of these, but not the sonnet, which may serve instead as a synecdoche for written formal poetry. The influence of los letrados has both authorized and confined the circulation of ideas in the region, and in this way their influence may be analogous to that of the sonnet. Thus when Storni, Lihn, and Arenas use the sonnet tradition, part of their cultural inheritance as letrados, they confront the old order through an established aesthetic form to reconfigure or question the opposition between high and low cultural forms to varying degrees and to different ends. In their own ways, these three poets represent unexpected occupants of the sonnet’s architecture who remodel and transform the space. Thinking about the use of the sonnet after modernism as a break with the past poses some inevitable problems: how can a return to formalism represent a divergence in the mid-to-late twentieth century when the avant-garde embraced free verse or even more radical ruptures with tradition? The use of the sonnet may provide another perspective on free verse, however, remind- ing us that it is not the end of innovation in a teleological view of poetic progression. Of course all poetry, fixed and open forms alike, works within a generic memory in ways that simultaneously disrupt and continue literary 3. Darıó’s use of the alexandrine is not apparent in many poets’ work much beyond modernism; this may be due to the Spanish Generation of ’27, who turned more toward the Golden Age, or it may be that the form became too closely associated with modernism by later writers who wanted to move away from Darıó’s influence. 390 i hispanic review : autumn 2008 tradition. Some questions depend on who is writing the sonnet: when one uses this form, does one necessarily enter the plot of the Petrarchan love lyric, in which ‘‘masculine, heterosexual desire’’ frames ‘‘a silent, beautiful, distant female object’’ or are there possibilities for the expression of alternative speaking subjects (Homans 570)? Sonnets may concern subjects other than love, of course, and even when love is the focus, the dialogue with tradition stimulated by the form may not mimic standards, but can make us see the ‘‘artificialities of received convention’’ (Keller 264). In her essay on the poetry of North American lesbian poet Marilyn Hacker, Lynn Keller uses this phrase to describe how this author employs the sonnet to demonstrate a ‘‘performative formalism’’; like that of Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance, Hacker’s use of the sonnet makes us recognize how the form constitutes, rather than reflects, our realities (264). Keller’s ideas will resonate in different ways in the detailed analysis of the sonnets that follows, but in every case, the very conventionality of the form is a central element in the creation of meaning. Reflections on form also bring to the fore broader tensions between accounts of literary tradition as a history of ruptures or of continuities. The poets I consider here will allow us to complicate the terms of this opposition and see the sonnet as a story of ‘‘possible alternative histories which were ‘repressed’ and, from time to time, break in as ‘returns of the repressed’ ’’ (Zˇ izˇek 123).4 ‘‘Translating’’ Zˇ izˇek’s remark about film from Freudian terms to broader cultural and historical associations linked to poetry, the following analysis suggests that these sonnets may also mark the change and continuity that characterizes the uneven development and consequent hybrid poetic traditions exemplary of Latin America’s postcolonial situation. Storni uses the inherited form to challenge gender and other cultural expectations; Lihn uses it as an analogy to dictatorship; and Arenas uses it to traverse a marginal sexual identity. As we will see, their selective renegotiations of the sonnet form vary according to the social challenges they confront. For each, the sonnet might work as a talisman, a fetish, an artifact, or a ritual; this last term recalls Renato Rosaldo’s description of ritual, not as static or conven- tional, but as a ‘‘busy intersection’’ where ‘‘cultural transmission may be detoured, deflected or replaced’’ (qtd.

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